Kemerton, Worcestershire

Passing glances

Not far from the house in my previous post is another not far away, up a different lane near the same Worcestershire village. This one was spotted first by the Resident Wise Woman, who’d taken a walk up and around Bredon Hill. When she came home, she told me about this house, built with battlements like a mock-castle, on a lane that led up the hill.

What she had discovered was Bell’s Castle, built in 1825, on the site of some earlier workers’ cottages and incorporating a small look-out tower already there (on the left in the photograph). The client was an Admiral or Captain Edmund Bell. He was said to have been a pirate or buccaneer who, in those Napoleonic times, robbed French ships of booty such as silk, gold and wine, sending the booty from the Bristol Channel up the Severn and Avon, unloading it and carrying it by packhorses to his ‘caste’, where it could be stowed in his cellars. It was also said that he carried on his piratical exploits after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and that his activities eventually led to his arrest and execution.

Whatever the truth of the colourful stories about Edmund Bell, his castle-like house remains a good example of the fashion for fanciful Gothic-style houses in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The architectural aim was to display some of the features of a fortified structure, such as towers and battlements, to give the idea of a medieval castle without the inconvenience of the tiny windows and cumbersome portcullises that an actual fortified building would have had. Although the fashion for such buildings has long gone, this one remains, thanks in part to the Holland-Martin family of Overbury, who owned the building more recently. It is still a private house and is not open to the public, but makes an attractive sight on the slopes of Bredon Hill.

Kemerton, Worcestershire

 

Distant prospects

One of the themes of this blog is the pleasure to be gained from unexpected architectural encounters – those views of buildings that one glimpses from the road while going from A to B – and so much the better if there’s the opportunity to stop and take a closer or longer look. There’s something especially rewarding about chancing upon something in one’s local patch, a notable building that’s only visible from a road or footpath that one doesn’t normally use. I often pass through the village of Kemerton, in Worcestershire, and even occasionally stop there for a coffee on a quiet morning, but the other day I made a detour, little more than driving around three sides of a rectangle of roads to return in the direction I’d come. It was then that I caught sight of the house in my photograph.

One field separates Kemerton Court from the rural road I was driving along. Even from a moving car I could make out a building that looked special, and it wasn’t long before I returned, walked up the same road, and had a longer look. I saw a Cotswold stone front of the early-18th century, apparently very well built, mostly of ashlar. The window surrounds are quite plain – the keystones are small and not especially showy – and the doorway has a triangular pediment with Doric or Tuscan pilasters running down from its ends. Plain it may be, but the articulation of the frontage is quite sophisticated – notice how the central bay and the pairs of outer bays are set slightly forward of the rest, to give some visual interest, while the round-topped window and the little circular window above it emphasise the central bay. The finials on the parapet (which resemble either egg cups or acorns according to how you see them) and the survival of the small panes in the windows are pleasing touches. There’s also an eye-catching contrast of curves, with the string course below the round window going one way and the curves in the parapet going the other. It’s this kind of contrast that shows the influence of the baroque style on whoever it was who designed this facade. The architect is not known – Smith of Warwick and Thomas White of Worcester are possible candidates.

This facade fronts an older house of the 16th century, and following the road round to the rear of the house reveals a less symmetrical structure. Looking from the road was all I was going to do, though, as Kemerton Court is a private house and not open to the public. I’m grateful, though, that its satisfying west front could be seen, at arm’s length as it were, just one green field away.

Kemerton, Worcestershire

Waggonettes, Worcestershire, and Wessex

Buildings get under our skin for all kinds of reasons and often it’s the most incidental detail that catches the eye and stays in the memory. So here for me, it was not the double-fronted stone house but the brick extension, and most of all the sign above what must once have been a shop window. Not quite faded enough to be a ghost sign perhaps, it still comes to us as if from another era.

The sign looks Victorian in style – both the curlicues around the lettering and that final full stop have a 19th-century feel about them. But it could as easily be from the interwar period, a time when both horses and horse-drawn vehicles were still in demand, especially in the country – this village is several miles from the nearest town.

The carriages on offer provided transport for several passengers in two strikingly different forms. In a landau, with its pair of seats, passengers sat facing one another across a central dropped foot well, rather like travellers in an old-fashioned railway compartment, either facing the horse or with their back to the horse. With a top that could be left down or pulled up against the rain, it was a rather sophisticated vehicle. In a waggonette, by contrast, the pair of seats were set parallel to the road, with just the driver’s seat facing ahead. I think of waggonettes as usually open-topped vehicles with hard wooden seats, seen more often in the countryside than the more comfortable and urban landau. They were the minibuses of their time.

The waggonette, then, seems a kind of carriage that would have been at home in rural Worcestershire. As it was too in Hardy’s Wessex, and when I saw the sign I was instantly reminded of Hardy’s poem, ‘At Castle Boterel’, in which the poet pauses at a junction familiar because of something important that happened there when he was much younger:

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And rain bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.

Hardy doesn’t explain exactly what happened all those years ago – could it have been a declaration of love? – but emphasizes its significance. As the poem goes on (you can read all of it here), the twin scenes – the young poet and the ‘girlish form’, the older poet looking back – are seen against a broader picture of passing time. There was never a moment of such quality, Hardy says, as that first time all those years ago, even though we’re all transitory beings in the context of ‘Earth’s long order’. In such a setting, vivid details such as the sodden waggonette become moving in a surprising and rather unnerving way.

Looking at an old sign advertising forms of horse-drawn transport triggers an association for me because I happen to have read Hardy’s poem. For some, it’s just an old sign. But such scraps and fragments of former days shown forth in old signs – waggonettes and landaus, seed potatoes and hay, Bovril and Bile Beans – are apt to act as bridges to former times in this way, bringing us suddenly into close connection with the past. And some of the backward glances they illuminate are as bright and arresting as Hardy’s on that rainy byway long ago.